Red Sparrow

"When people think of American spy novels, they almost certainly think of Jason Bourne in the series by Robert Ludlum or of Jack Ryan in Patriot Games and The Hunt for Red October by Tom Clancy . As I said, they tend to be on a much bigger canvas. You might have the American president himself playing a key role or a senior general inside the Pentagon doing dastardly things to aid the military-industrial complex. You won’t have a George Smiley, sitting in a library painstakingly going through files or spending eighty pages talking to Connie Sachs. The Americans just don’t do it that way: they believe in heroes, action, sex and violence. Red Sparrow is a really good example of an American spy novel. One of the reasons for that is that Jason Matthews, who sadly died this year, was himself a CIA officer. It’s almost always the case that the best spy novelists were themselves touched by the intelligence services in real life in some way. Charles McCarry , for example, was also in the CIA. Red Sparrow is a fantastically well written and authentic spy novel, but it also has those American characteristics of giving Vladimir Putin a walk-on part, scenes of fairly unrealistic, kinky sex, and violent characters meeting violent ends. Then, bizarrely, there’s a recipe at the end of each chapter, which is charming, but quite disarming at the same time. The book was a huge, huge bestseller in the United States when it came out and they made a film of it with Jennifer Lawrence. I wish they would do the same with some of Dan Fesperman’s books . He’s also a really first-class American spy writer who deserves a bigger readership. The book came out nearly a decade ago, and I think probably in the #MeToo era, a lot of the attitudes towards women and sex might fail to clear hurdles in American publishing today. That’s not to accuse Jason of sexism, it’s just that times have changed so much. I’m in the British tradition of broadly realistic stories of individuals working inside or outside the secret world, and the scrapes that they get into and the psychological impact of working in that world over a long period of time. I see myself in the tradition of Len Deighton, John le Carré and Eric Ambler, rather than in the tradition of Robert Ludlum, Tom Clancy, and Jason Matthews. You could say that British spy fiction is quieter and more nuanced. And we usually make less money! Hitchcock is a really significant figure in the spy genre. A number of films he made: Notorious , North by Northwest , Saboteur , Foreign Correspondent , The Man Who Knew Too Much are spy stories. They have tropes—either that Hitchcock borrowed from source novels or that he and his screenwriters invented—which served the spy genre, both on and off-screen, for the next half-century. In this respect, Hitchcock is almost as important to the serious thriller as John Buchan or Eric Ambler or Erskine Childers, the writer of The Riddle of the Sands . It began with a book called Box 88 , which is coming out in the States next month. BOX 88 is an Anglo-American intelligence service operating without political oversight, under the radar, made up of various members of the CIA, MI5 and MI6 as well as Special Forces. They do the jobs that government-sanctioned intelligence services can’t or won’t do. In movie terms, it’s a kind of Mission Impossible unit, but they don’t have melting masks or Tom Cruise clinging to the side of a cargo plane as it takes off. I’d always wanted to write a novel set in the 1990s, to examine what MI5 and MI6 were up to in that decade without spy stories. What you get in Box 88 —and its sequel, Judas 62 —is two stories for the price of one. You see the recruitment and the development of a young spy called Lachlan Kite. He’s recruited in 1989, straight out of school, at the age of 18. You see his early operations as fledgling spy through the 1990s. But you also see him in the present day when those operations have come back to haunt him. He’s a man of 50 who has lived in this strange, compelling world for 30 years; you see the person he has become. That’s always been the juice for me. I love going to these places, eating the food, smelling the air and talking to people on the ground, getting stories and information out of them that inspire a work of fiction. Judas 62 was unusual in that I couldn’t go to Voronezh to research the Russian parts because of the pandemic. I was relying completely on people who had been there or had lived there, or secondary sources, YouTube, Google Maps. But I did go to Dubai two or three times. Unlike most people, I really liked it. It’s a fascinating place. The other major change to spy fiction in the last 30 years—apart from Putin, al Qaeda and ISIS, Snowden and Assange—is technology. Judas 62 tries to show you how the world of spying has changed since the Cold War. In the 1993 section, Kite obviously has no access to mobile phones, to Wi-Fi, to satellites: he’s completely isolated in Russia and has to fend for himself. The Kite of 2020 in Dubai, on the other hand, is under 24-hour surveillance from CCTV and number plate recognition cameras. His phone, his credit cards, his search engine metadata give him away all the time. The mobile phone has totally changed not only intelligence work, but also storytelling. Yes. You can always call for help. If somebody needs to get hold of you, you can be reached. You can be followed. Somebody can demonstrate from your mobile phone that you were in a place where you shouldn’t have been. If you don’t have a mobile phone with you because you’re going to meet somebody you shouldn’t be meeting—a Russian intelligence officer for example—that, in itself, is suspicious. Why would somebody ever be without their mobile phone? So they always have to be taken into account, in the field and on the page. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . Technology has inverted spying and spy fiction. For example, it’s now more or less impossible for an intelligence officer to take on a fake identity in a hostile state. In the classic Cold War novels, the hero could go to East Germany as Mark Jones and it would be very easy to stand that legend up. If they fell under suspicion, the Stasi would make a phone call to London and ask, ‘Have you ever heard of Mark Jones?’ And the answer would be, ‘Oh yes, we know Mark very well’ because it would be MI6 answering the phone. Nowadays, if a spy goes to Dubai and pretends to be Mark Jones it’s impossible because of online banking records, Twitter, Facebook, retinal scans, biometric passports and all the rest. The authorities can check out your story in a thousand different ways. It’s impossible to make a legend stand up under even moderate scrutiny. The skills needed are still quite similar. Obviously, they need people with technical proficiency, computer wonks and programmers. They also need people who can speak Mandarin, Farsi, Russian, Arabic. It’s almost put six foot six white, old Etonian men like me out of business; they want people who have an ethnic background that will allow them to blend into different environments in the Middle East, Russia, China or wherever."